Ambivalence
by Anonymous033
Summary: Sequel to 'Soul Mates'. This is from Ziva's POV, her thoughts on Tony and their relationship.


**Summary: Sequel to 'Soul Mates', from Ziva's POV. Ziva's thoughts on and feelings towards Tony.**

**Disclaimer: NCIS and Tiva still not mine.**

**Spoilers: Mostly Jeanne Benoit and Michael Rivkin, references from many episodes, up till episode 7x13: Jet Lag.**

**Thanks for the reviews on my other fanfic! They were lovely :) maybe it's just because I've never done this before, but it made me very happy and a little giddy . please review this, if you can.**

* * *

**Ambivalence**

It was five past midnight before Ziva finally finished up with her paperwork. She drove home immediately, unwilling to remain alone in the dark and deserted bullpen any longer. She was annoyed at Tony for having left her there on her own, because although she wasn't the type who needed to be taken care of, it was much less lonely having someone there to stare at her.

As she rolled to a stop at a red light, Ziva pondered for a moment on how Tony had been acting the whole day. He had probably thought she hadn't noticed him glancing at her all throughout the entire flight home from Paris, but being Ziva, of course, she had felt it so acutely that it had actually made the tiny hairs on her neck rise. She had tried to ignore it at first, feeling amused more than anything else that he had chosen to continue his occupation of the previous night. As the day progressed the intensity of his stares increased, though, and it had gone from amusing to slightly unnerving to downright irritating.

Yet strangely enough, although she had been almost ready to kill Tony with a paperclip by the time night approached, she had instantly felt an emptiness in her gut when he got up to go home. It wasn't so much that she enjoyed being stared at by him as it was that his physical presence there was a comfort to her. This seemed frequently the case since she'd come back from Somalia; Tony's desperate determination to avenge her death, albeit with the help of the rest of the team, had caused her to develop an odd sense of trust in him. It was not the kind of trust that came from a solid friendship and years of working together, but rather the deeper trust that Tony would sooner get tortured and killed than let her life go to waste. In that twisted manner, she loved that at least one person would grieve if she died.

Her thoughts flashed back to the time when Tony himself had almost died. He had been undercover then, on assignment by then director Jenny Shepard, and his car had been blown up right in front of them all. Ziva could vividly remember the horror she had felt when she had heard the deafening roar of the explosion and then seen the flare of the bright burning ball of fire with the twisted pieces of metal flying in all directions.

It later turned out that he had not been in the car when the explosion had occurred and had thus survived, but Ziva now wondered if she would have avenged his death if he hadn't. She had been insanely in love with him then, and thinking that he was dead had been like forcefully removing her heart and grating it into a thousand confetti-shaped bits. When he'd eventually turned up alive she had tried to tell him how she felt, but he had been so in love with Jeanne Benoit that he could never hear what she was struggling to tell him. In the end she had just given up and worked harder on getting over him than she had ever worked on anything before in her life. And of course, just when she had succeeded and moved on, he would suddenly become concerned for her.

Ziva shocked even herself with how she reacted over Tony's distrust of Michael Rivkin. She wanted to believe that it was because she had loved Michael, but part of her knew that it was because she had been very angry with Tony. She had loved him for months, even years, and he had carelessly pushed her aside like the many women with whom he flirted but forgot the moment he turned his back. And so she had striven to forget him, and when she had finally found another man to love he had had to destroy the little happiness that she felt. For weeks after the day that she had burst into her apartment to find Tony with a gun in his hands and Michael bleeding to his death on the floor, she had wished that she had not hesitated to shoot Tony dead.

Then Somalia had happened, and Tony had gone to avenge her death but had brought her back alive instead, and that made her just as confused as she had been before Jeanne and Michael ever got between them. She wasn't sure whether she loved him or not; it made her tingle each time he walked into a room, but she could not help feeling like he could hurt her at the snap of his fingers. She had always been hurt by the men in her life: her father, her brother Ari, and Michael, but none of them could mess with her mind like Tony did. He seemed to be able to make her love him and hate him all at the same time, and he himself seemed to love and hate her in quite the same way that she did him. She constantly wanted to run as far away from him as she could, and yet her heart seemed to drop to her stomach each time she thought of it. This was the ambivalence in which she had gone with Tony to Paris.

Approaching her apartment now, Ziva pulled up at the curb and parallel parked neatly. She turned off the engine, grabbed her backpack and trudged up the stairs slowly, willing not to reach her apartment too quickly because she didn't know if she could bear its cold loneliness after two whole days with Tony by her side. Reaching the top of the stairs, she unlocked the door and entered. The sheer silence inside stunned her for a moment, but familiar pieces of rich mahogany furniture and plush cream carpets soon greeted her as her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she relaxed. This was home, after all. Though looking around, it felt as if home was missing something – or someone.


End file.
